24CH is returning…let's hope the Habs reality show has more bite this year

Josh Gorges, left, and Ryan White tap each other on the head following victory over New Jersey Devils in Montreal Sept. 23. (John Mahoney/THE GAZETTE)

So 24CH is returning. Your Montreal Canadiens announced Tuesday morning that everyone’s favourite hockey soap opera (eds. note: Isn’t that L’antichambre) is coming back for a second season, and it’ll be playing weekly on Canal D, RDS, RDS2, TSN and TSN2. So in other words, you’ll have a hard time missing the Habs reality show.

The first edition will air Oct. 5 and there are 27 30-minute shows on the way. It’ll be on Canal D Saturday nights at 6:30 p.m., just before the Habs game, and on RDS at 10:45, after L’antichambre. Like last year, it’ll follow our hockey heroes behind-the-scenes, in the locker room and elsewhere.

The big change is that it’s not being produced by RDS and the Canadiens this year. It has been given to the hot independent production company Attraction Images and the guy in charge will be none other than Stéphane Laporte, the producer and writer behind Star Académie, Le Banquier, and La Voix. He’s the top producer in Quebec’s reality-TV biz and he also happens to be maybe the biggest Habs fan in the province.

I think he’s just the guy to take 24CH to the next level. I’m just hoping that Laporte takes off the kid gloves and gives the show a bit of edge. It was a remarkably tame show last year, never daring to come anywhere near showing anything remotely negative about the team, the coach or the players.

And that’s boring. The HBO series 24/7 is so great precisely because they happily keep the cameras rolling when coaches like Bruce Boudreau and John Tortorella are losing the plot in the room. With 24CH, kindly ol’ coach Michel Therrien made sure the cameras weren’t rolling when the feces hit the ventilator in the dressing room.

I know the official Habs reality series isn’t going to ask the tough questions, that it isn’t going to wonder aloud why the once-storied franchise has slipped into 20 years of mediocrity. But we want at least a little dirt. We want to see Therrien losing it. We want to see players behaving badly.

We want some juice. A little spice. We don’t want to hear how great Marc Bergevin is. How P.K. Subban’s got a big heart. Reality shows work by playing up conflict. So what do you think Stéphane? Can we take it up a notch this year?

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